Linked by Jordan Spencer Cunningham on Mon 28th Sep 2009 18:21 UTC, submitted by Michael
Phoronix was kind enough to add a deliciously lengthy nine-page compare and contrast between FreeBSD 8 and Ubuntu 9.10 to their arsenal of articles. "Canonical will be releasing Ubuntu 9.10 at the end of next month while the final release of FreeBSD 8.0 is also expected within the next few weeks. With these two popular free software operating systems both having major updates coming out at around the same time, we decided it warranted some early benchmarking as we see how the FreeBSD 8.0 and Ubuntu 9.10 performance compares. For looking more at the FreeBSD performance we also have included test results from FreeBSD 7.2, the current stable release. In this article are mostly the server and workstation oriented benchmarks with the testing being carried out on a dual AMD Opteron quad-core workstation."
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Member since:
2006-12-28
As a Unix system engineer, I install big iron serves as a job. All of these installations include optimization and I'm sorry to say this so bluntly, it never just "depends". In fact, if I where to say that to a customer, they would tell me to get lost.
When a customer buys a system, they are always for a particular task, be that database, java applications, backup infrastructure, the list goes on. Every time we optimize for a task, it is always on the basis of speed.
If a customer wants a system to be good at heavy user loads, then we optimize for I/O and filesystem speed and try to keep the amount of background processes to a minimum. With java applications, it's all about cutting the system down to the minimum and making sure the app server has as many resources as possible. Believe me, java app servers are hungry. As for databases, it's about filesystem block size more than anything.
What do all of these have in common? Speed. There is no way that your system is optimized if it's slow. If your system runs dog slow to begin with, it is not going to be any faster under high load.
I have been dealing with high end Unix systems for the past seven years and that is no rule of thumb. That is a fact. Yes, I can throw a thousand users at a Solaris or AIX box, but I can do that just as easily with a Linux box. And it'd be half the price on a Linux machine to boot.